Have you heard about GAFAs?

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

In France, business-related publishers refer to Google-Apple-Facebook-Amazon as a single group. And because the french love acronyms, they called it 'GAFA's.

Beyond the sheer horror of the acronym, I don't think it's fair to associate these companies together.

• Apple makes money off products
• Facebook makes money off ads (i.e. off the user)
• Amazon harvests a lot of data but offers products/services (B2C/B2B)
• Google (similarly to both FB and Amazon) has B2B/B2C components in addition to the ads.

Out of all of these, Apple is the only one I can think of with Privacy at heart. This was recently reiterated last week when Tim Cook was interviewed by Kara Swisher on MSNBC/Recode:

The truth is we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer. If our customer was our product, we could make a ton of money. We’ve elected not to do that. Because we don’t ... our products are iPhones and iPads and Macs and HomePods and the Watch, etc., and if we can convince you to buy one, we’ll make a little bit of money, right? But you are not our product.

I really don’t like this acronym. These companies couldn’t be more different.